Education as the Forging of Subjects*

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma

Notwithstanding all our song and dance about the sublime
aims of our education, the fact remains that we live under capitalism and our
education is the principal apparatus for the production of subjects under
capitalism. This implies our deep implication and investment in relations of
power of which the dominant motif is oppression.

This is not, however, to discount education as a project
of freedom but to face the truth that it is also the site of the most crucial
but normally invisible struggle between forces of subjection and those of
freedom.

When we mention “subjection” we do imply human beings who
get subjected, but it does not follow that there are always human subjects who
are intentionally bent on pushing others into subjection. Indeed, a good deal of
subjection is non-subjective and – for precisely this reason – more insidious,
widespread and hard to resist. The oppressors are often subject to elusive,
incomprehensible forces - a kind of gods of yore .

When the virus of subjection has infiltrated the very
nervous system of freedom, you need a splintered. polyfinished mirror to catch
the spots. You need the mirror of a cracking, fragmented, repetitive, overlaying
language that is not scared of doing surgery on itself. Education can heal
itself only by doing violence to its informing language. The volcano of
violence that erupts in New York today and Godhra tomorrow cannot be frozen into
a monument of instruction without first dismantling the myth of education as an
innocent adventure.

Whose interests does this grossly inadequate, elegantly
crude definition of violence serve? What about the violence which happens when a
child is forced to eat and vomit alien(ating) nursery rhymes? When a teenager is
served a starvation diet of careers? When soap operas and commercials harass you
like mosquitoes in the privacy of your bedroom? When, on a footpath in old
Delhi, a chance look at Deepak Chopra’s recipe for finding God raises you to the
seventh heaven of bliss? When Cadbury’s range of Temptations overwrites
the epic magnitude of Eve’s temptation in your random access memory? When you
feel like Kafka’s cockroach in your dehumanizing environment? Or when you don’t
even get to know that you are that cockroach –grubbing, on a junky footpath,
among stock market news, pornography and commercial divinity for some elusive
redemption?

There is violence and there is the myth of violence. The
myth is slighter but it overwhelms the reality with its exclusory, defining
force in discourse. What we eventually get to see of violence is a sanitized,
censored version. With its mediated intensity, which is on a relentless auto
reinvent mode, it manages to keep the eye glued to itself. What happens beyond
the margins of the myth would not be recognized as violence. The victim would
not be empowered to name the thing, to call it violence.

Hence this: education against violence begins after we
have violently torn apart the myth of violence, have learned to grapple with the
distinction between violence and the myth of violence.

In a way then, the initiatory act of education is an act
of violence.

Let us, therefore, set the oppressive violence apart from
the enabling violence.

The Gita, inscribed in the peculiar event of its
transmission, could be read as a paradigmatic text of education in the way it
both performs and confronts violence – the former as a creative, saving act; the
latter as a necessary, ambient fact. Without these two that go together, peace
is impotency and flight. And the peace of a living, advancing people cannot
afford to be that.

Krishna un-makes Arjuna in order to bring him to re-create
himself. He makes him see. And the seeing is violent, cataclysmic. It is
impossible that without this Arjuna should confront the violence that blows all
about him, threatening to tear up the banyan tree of dharma. His subsequent
intervention is, hence, predicated on a twin experience of violence: he suffers
violent rebirth in order to be able to experience the ambient violence as
violence, as violation. He would be denuded of illusions in order to stand
before the bare reality of violence.

Education must divest us of illusions and make us see, or
it is not education. The seeing cannot happen unless we become self-reflexive.
The silent infection of paralysing memory has to be overcome for us to be able
to create ourselves anew. A violent rupture with ourselves marks the moment of
our initiation into reflexive subjectivity.

The present crisis of education can be located in a
conflict of objectives in respect of subjectivity. There is education for
reproduction and there is education for re-creation. The first, which is akin to
the process of industrial mass duplication and which answers to the imperatives
of the economies of scale, aims at reproducing efficiently programmed replicas.
The second aims at the subject’s rebirth, the earth-shattering process that
opens one's eyes into reflexive awareness and makes him dvija, the
twice-born. The continuance of capitalism, however, is best ensured by the
reproduction of subjectivities. In place of human beings you have human
resources that must be employed and exploited optimally to extract the
highest profitability. Education gets increasingly identified with training and
the upgrading of economically productive skills. The remaining spaces in the
structure of subjectivity are filled up with mass-produced standardized
entertainment, “interpersonal skills” and safe political attitudes – and the
newspaper wisdom stuffs the head with a dash of “the intellectual”. Whether
through affluence or through privation, the serpent of subjectivity just fails
to put its mouth and tail together. To the reproduced subject, the reflexive
threshold remains elusive.

Yet even a subject forged in the reproductive machinery of
capitalism must inevitably exceed the objectives of his forging. The subject’s
ineludible humanity must overtake his alienation as a reproduction and haunt and
sting him with the dream of authenticity. The dream poisons the media-induced
fantasy of this human resource, engendering suffering that persists as
long as his humanity suffers violation. The subject’s problem is he can neither
shrink to a resource nor buy humanity off the shelf.

The task before education, then, is to either resolve or
transcend the contradiction between reproduction and re-creation. However, with
resolution ruled out by the very nature of the contradiction, transcendence as
an effect of history remains the sole possibility. Capitalism may not have
suspected it but in the age of postmodernism when reproduction is trash and
creativity (including creative rehashing) wealth, the re-created subjectivity
might prove to be more productive than the mere reproduced subjectivity.
Authentically reflexive subjectivities may not be in tune with the demands of an
oppressive and totalitive global economic order, but these should be harmonious
with a dispersive and free world economy. With the world currently poised on the
edge of chaos between these two impending orders, the shape of the future may
not emerge any soon. But that shape, if it is to house the human being, will
critically depend on ideas and actions that are clearly intended to intervene in
the course of events to give them direction.

The decentring of power will not translate into the
deconcentration of power so long as people are mere points, not engines, in the
field of power. Their transformation into the engines of power, the true
vocation of human education, cannot be achieved unless they step off the
assembly line of reproduction and begin to self-reflect.

This, however, requires de-oppressing the apparatus of
education to allow human power to circulate freely.

If the gravity of the matter will allow some levity, I
would concede that a great deal is happening in our universities to set the
education free. During a recent exercise in academic auditing (!) a team of dons
and managers visited the college where I work. I suggested a system of regular
interaction between the faculty of the affiliating university and that of its
colleges. “We appreciate your point of view. You mean the colleges should
function as franchisees of the university. Happily, we are already working in
that direction,” the team leader informed me. His earnestness was transparent.

The problem is how to get rid of this bazaar vision of
education that has been seeping into the vocabulary of our thought and
imagination to fundamentally impair our ability to reflect as educators. At this
critical and dangerous hour, can we keep our eyes on what Foucault calls “the
microphysics of power” in education? Can we read the fine but gloomy print?
Critical intelligence and the power to critique depend on reflexivity. On
reading. On reflexive reading. Unfortunately, the text of education itself today
suffers from the malaise of diminishing readership, including that inside the
academy. As a consequence, we are becoming dead to the anguish of violence.

Violence does not always come as infliction. Sometimes,
indeed, it comes creeping as insinuation to inhabit and ensoul people. This
happens when the apparatus of education suppresses reflection and incentivizes
reproduction. Education has then become a forgery: inhuman, mechanical,
duplicitous.

In that event, reflexive reading, the kind that can stand
back and contemplate itself, can restore creativity and the transformative power
to education. It can neutralize the manipulation of power that moulds people
into pliant subjects. Thus it can create the conditions necessary for power to
circulate freely. The employment of this strategy of de-oppression, however,
requires that we range in the margins and interstices of the text with the
patience and ruthlessness of maniacal archeologists. Not really a great price to
pay to preserve our humanity.

The Indian education – if we may use this term with a cool
conscience – is in the process of change. But how much of the change is really
geared to excellence? Isn’t the greater part of it a mere tossing about for
survival? We are losing even the sense of proportion that is essential to know
the higher from the not so high. Universities and colleges are succumbing to the
mean temptations of the bazaar, mindlessly picking up and then throwing into the
trash bin courses as well as students. The humanities with their ideals and
ideas, for long the cherished space for education to do its bit of
self-reflection, receive a guilty and apologetic mention. While the institutions
of higher education that should act as bastions of judgement in a period of
indirection have either fallen silent or begun to dance and sing to the techno
music of faddish idiotologies, the society is back to sheer survival – albeit as
a mass of cyborg cavemen. Hence we bask vicariously in the American fantasy of
the Spiderman – the creepy insect-god as a nauseating and infantile plastic
messiah for the post-9/11 world, metaphorising an impossible double escape into
the past and the future. We have our own homespun fantasies too – like Amir
Khan’s pseudo-revenge on British imperialism through a moronic reappropriation
of cricket and the competitively packaged and remixed versions of Bhagat Singh’s
life and thought. Resistance and revolution rehashed for a bored and drugged
market.

And yet these are the texts the academy is the least
inclined to touch even with a long pole.

Perhaps the time has come to de-institutionalize education
at our own end and let it slink into the slums and service lanes of the academy.
The emerging dominant paradigm of education is displaying all the signs of being
ruthlessly incorporative. For the sake of a peace that is not of the graveyard,
we must embrace the tactics of the guerilla. We must rummage every text –
literal or visual, cultural or economic, bodily or spiritual – and rip open each
sign. For in the manufactory of these signs and texts is our subjection being
forged. These signs and texts hide their bottoms under cover of a fabricated
economic and cultural-military consensus with global pretensions. The time has
come to expose these bottoms. The night has gotten the inkiest ever.

I am not making out a case for academic anarchy. On the
contrary, I hold that education in any significant form may not survive the ruin
of its institutions. What I am skeptical of is the icy institutionalism that
might extinguish the last sparks of that individual and eccentric fire which is
so necessary to keep education a/live. Institutional education is a
contradiction in terms and education must overflow the institution. The
institutions exist to nurture free subjectivities, not to forge subjects. When
these begin to compete as the ancillary units of multinational industry and
trade, it is time the educators should dig their souls for possible symptoms of
complicity. The last thing we can afford to forget is the human being who
should be at the heart of any project of education. To institute profits in that
place is the ultimate betrayal, the last profanation of education. It amounts to
the abandonment of humanity and constitutes spiritual dereliction.

On their part, our institutions of education could go down
the history lane to pick up a few lessons. Hopefully, they would be better
equipped to fight the spreading dehumanization if they could adequately
internalize the critique that is implied in the concept of the gurukul for our
times.

The gurukul is not impersonal. It is not institutional.
Its scale of values is not derived from the market. It is not a forgery for the
production of subjects cheated of their humanity. It is the foundation of the
social order yet suitably distanced from that order to be able to deal
critically with it. It grows around personal relationships and functions as a
community (it does not need a manager nor can it be put online). It does teach
the practical skills but it never forgets its principal aim. Which is to teach
the people the art of rebirth, the art of self-transformation through
reflection.

August 2002

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*Presented at the
International Educational Conference on Culture of Peace and Non-violence at
Hans Raj Mahila Maha Vidyalaya, Jalandhar, Punjab (December 19-21, 2002).